Episode 147 - Imagine Being Whelmed

Episode 147 - Imagine Being Whelmed

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/fan_mail/new] The episode opens with the crew already several sips into the "False Doctrini", a “martini” only in the sense that Mormon doctrine is “unchanging”: technically presented with confidence, spiritually fraudulent, and dressed up in the right glassware. Abigail explains that the drink is raspberry lemonade mixed with Five Wives pink raspberry lemonade vodka, shaken up as a false doctrine tribute to polygamy, God changing his mind, and the sacred LDS art of pretending yesterday’s eternal truth was merely a seasonal accent wall. The intro then derails beautifully through pop culture and moral panic: Andy Serkis allegedly doing Animal Farm dirty, true crime rage over The Crash, bishlet news, non-gay hockey romance with suspiciously emotionally literate men, Lord of the Flies, Widow’s Bay, drunk escape rooms, secret Murphy doors, and the eternal question of whether every respectable basement should contain either hidden booze or an ominous interrogation chair. The vibe is raspberry lemonade chaos with a little legal deposition energy and just enough podcast-host ADHD to qualify as liturgy.  History: [00:22:59] Abigail’s history segment starts with the question “what is a prophet?” and immediately answers it with the spiritual precision of a brick through a stained-glass window: an audacious bullshit mediocre man. She breaks down “prophet, seer, and revelator” as less three distinct divine job titles and more one corporate Mormon leadership smoothie, then pivots into prophecy as historical interpretation rather than fortune-telling. Revelation gets reframed as anti-imperial political theology in dragon clothes, not a spooky end-times spreadsheet, which leads to the real test: if prophets cannot correctly interpret the moral emergencies happening right in front of their stupid faces, what exactly are we calling prophecy? The main historical meat is Spencer W. “Spanker Wanker” Kimball, whose pedigree Mormon lineage, Arizona childhood, illnesses, apostleship, and presidency become a case study in how one sad biography and one raspy voice do not magically produce moral authority. Abigail covers The Miracle of Forgiveness, its sexual shame machinery, its victim-blaming rape rhetoric, its masturbation panic, and its explicit harm to queer members. She also digs into Kimball’s role in racist teachings about Native Americans and the Indian Placement Program, then connects his presidency to the 1978 priesthood and temple ban reversal. The segment’s thesis lands hard: prophets did not need supernatural revelation to know racism, coercion, homophobia, and sexual shame were harming people. They needed the courage to tell the truth when truth threatened their own power, and historically, the brethren chose the folding chair marked “institutional cowardice.”  FHE: [01:43:24] The FHE segment turns to the CES Letter’s Prophets section, where aaaAAAaaa notes that Jeremy Runnells has clearly moved past humble question-asker and entered his “I have receipts and rage” era. The crew walks through the chapter’s recurring indictment: yesterday’s doctrine is today’s false doctrine, and yesterday’s prophet is today’s heretic. They hit Adam-God theory, blood atonement, polygamy, the priesthood and temple ban, and the eternal LDS shell game where leaders claim they cannot lead the church astray until the church needs to quietly shove an old prophet under the doctrinal bus. The discussion gets especially sharp around Brigham Young, Spencer W. Kimball, Gordon B. Hinckley’s Larry King polygamy dodge, Brazil and the logistical collapse of racial gatekeeping, and the financial/institutional pressures surrounding church reversals. The Mark Hofmann section becomes a full discernment autopsy: prophets, seers, and revelators failed to spot a forger and murderer sitting under their noses, while the Tanners, actual professional church critics, had better instincts about the Salamander Letter. The episode then takes a long political detour through Mamdani, Jeff Bezos, city-owned grocery stores, Trump phones, gerontocracy, psychedelics, Barbie vans, toxic men, and baby prison, because apparently no CES Letter discussion is complete until someone has proposed a DMT-powered rebirth canal museum visible from space. Somehow, it all circles back to the core point: if someone claims to speak for God, the bare minimum should be causing less harm than the average elected goblin with a podcast mic. Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/ewzxRmUhK) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode.. If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at greatandspaciouspod@gmail.com. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast! Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/support]

Episode 146 - My Emotional Support Virgin

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/fan_mail/new] To celebrate Joseph Smith’s sacred calling to spiritually wife other men’s wives, aaaAAAaaa serves up the Orson Hide and Seek, named for Apostle Orson Hyde, who was conveniently away dedicating Palestine while Joseph secretly married his wife, Marinda. The drink combines Utah-made Stinger hard apple cider with a hidden shot dropped into the glass, because nothing says “restored gospel” like a surprise second relationship concealed inside the first one. The intro immediately wanders into beautifully unnecessary territory: fake temple wedding photos taken at prom, the anatomical inappropriateness of the word “erected” appearing anywhere near a temple, post-half-marathon stair descent, Alan Parsons Project arena music, Apple TV betrayals, HBO’s Neighbors, and the revelation that Mel Gibson is making a two-part, multiple-timeline, Satan-origin-story sequel to The Passion of the Christ. The overall vibe is cider, sore quads, neighbor feuds, and everyone slowly realizing that reality has fired parody and taken its job. History: [00:26:40] Abigail begins with the “Law of Sarah,” the biblical consent loophole Mormon polygamy borrowed from the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, an enslaved woman whose reproductive exploitation somehow became inspirational source material for religious men looking to make their erections doctrinal. From there, the segment traces the recurring historical pattern of powerful men finding ancient scripture and announcing that their penis has a biblical precedent: early Christian clergy keeping supposedly chaste “spiritual” women in their homes, church councils having to explicitly outlaw decorative live-in virgins, Protestant rulers rummaging through Abraham for permission to take second wives, and Puritanism turning sex into something intensely policed rather than remotely healthy. The segment then connects that same architecture of control to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, emphasizing that Gilead’s use of Hagar, coerced reproduction, religious hierarchy, and ownership of women was assembled from things societies have actually done. Abigail brings the argument home through Mormon purity culture, where women are trained to treat sexual desire as contamination until marriage, then expected to become sexually available overnight. In that system, Joseph Smith’s marriages to teenage girls are not rendered harmless by claims that they may have been “eternity only”; placing a child in a marriage-shaped relationship with a prophet who controls her family’s salvation is already coercive. The segment closes with the only reasonable theological conclusion: purity culture is bullshit, subjugating women is bullshit, and any man attempting the latter should prepare for an extremely hostile review of his genitals. FHE: 01:22:47 For this week’s Family Home Evening from hell, Moroni takes the group through the CES Letter’s section on Joseph Smith’s polygamy and polyandry, beginning with the fact that many members were raised on the polished Emma-and-Joseph love story while being told absolutely nothing about the other thirty-something women in the celestial waiting room. The discussion focuses on Joseph’s marriages to women already married to living husbands, including Marinda Hyde while Orson Hyde was away on a mission, and the Church’s attempt to soften the whole thing by suggesting some of the relationships were merely dynastic or eternal. The hosts immediately identify the gaping problem: if sealing families together was the point, why was Joseph sealed to other men’s wives and teenage girls before being sealed to his own children? The group then works through the ways Joseph violated the rules supposedly revealed in Doctrine and Covenants 132: marrying already-married women, keeping unions secret from husbands and Emma, taking teenage girls and women who were obviously not virgins, marrying mother-daughter and sister sets, and using promises of exaltation or angel-with-a-sword threats as divine coercion. The rage reaches operatic levels with the Fanny Alger barn account, sworn statements denying polygamy from people participating in it, and the realization that “Praise to the Man” was apparently written about a man whose actual modus operandi involved secrecy, dishonesty, and spiritually branded sexual predation. The episode ends by placing Joseph Smith beside Warren Jeffs in an absolutely damning side-by-side comparison: many wives, underage wives, married women, mother-daughter pairings, sister wives, and the same prophetic authorization structure used to turn abuse into obedience. Warren Jeffs may have pressed the accelerator through the floor, but the road map was already there. After surviving the ecclesiastical sewage fire, the group regains just enough emotional stability to praise Oscar, a tiny Jack Russell puppy, instead of any dead prophet. Dog man. Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/ewzxRmUhK) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode.. If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at greatandspaciouspod@gmail.com. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast! Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/support]

Episode 145 - The Mummy With Papyrus in His Tummy

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/fan_mail/new] The gang welcomes Moroni back, in the flesh, for another papyrus-themed adventure with the “POG-pyrus”, a frozen tropical concoction made from guava nectar, passion fruit rum, vodka, sweetened condensed milk, and POG soda, churned through Abigail and aaaAAAaaa’s Costco Ninja Slushi machine. The drink is visually promised to be a creamy, swirly Egyptian artifact of delight, although its alcohol apparently settles at the bottom like an archaeological layer waiting to ambush whoever reaches it first. The intro wanders gloriously through weaponized Song of Solomon reading during temple baptisms, raising children with honest conversations about death and anatomy, mortifying old Gmail archaeology featuring Moroni’s dream destination of “probably Costco,” and the usual pop-culture buffet: Beef, The Boys accidentally predicting Trump’s gold-idol aesthetic, Ted Danson continuing to age like a flirtatious national treasure in Man on the Inside, and the horrifyingly tactile tongue-based kissing gameplay in Mixtape. The hosts also celebrate the Bishlet turning three, condemn the tiny terrorists at Play-Doh and Fisher-Price who design noisy toddler toys, and give overdue love to listener P. Luke Firestoker for supplying the podcast with delightfully unhinged fake advertisements.   HISTORY: [00:27:41] Abigail brings history back to the Book of Abraham through a much better mummy story: a recently excavated Roman-era mummy from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, found with a piece of papyrus deliberately placed on his body. Unlike Hor’s thoroughly ordinary funerary text that Joseph Smith spun into Abrahamic revelation, this papyrus reportedly contains a passage from Homer’s Iliad. Not just any dramatic passage about Achilles, grief, glory, or mortality, either. It is from the Catalogue of Ships, essentially the ancient world’s extended boat roster. Naturally, the hosts arrive at the only spiritually satisfying interpretation: this sweet mummy was autistic and loved boats. From there, the segment becomes an ecstatic sermon on archaeological garbage. Abigail explains how Oxyrhynchus became one of the richest sources of ancient papyrus fragments because the city’s dry rubbish heaps preserved discarded receipts, contracts, letters, magical texts, literary fragments, early Christian manuscripts, and probably at least some ancient smut. The city becomes the perfect rebuttal to Book of Abraham apologetics: yes, mummies can be buried with unexpected texts, including literature. But when trained scholars identify a papyrus as a passage listing ships, they do not get to announce that it secretly says, “Dear diary, it’s me, Abraham.” The true doctrine of the segment is simple and beautiful: history may belong to the victors, but garbage tells the truth.   FHE: [01:29:56] The hosts dive into the CES Letter’s Book of Abraham section, beginning with the Church’s own acknowledgment that Egyptologists agree the surviving papyrus fragments do not match Joseph Smith’s translation and are instead standard funerary texts dating long after Abraham. The hosts are less than impressed by an institution that effectively presents the evidence against itself and then asks members to believe harder anyway. They walk through the facsimiles and revel in Joseph’s catastrophic misses: the crocodile’s watery environment turned into cosmic theology, a funerary offering table upgraded into Abraham’s sacrificial altar, and the fertility god Min, visibly sporting an erection, identified by Joseph as God sitting on his throne revealing priesthood secrets. Heavenly Father, apparently, was having an extremely casual throne day. The discussion also tears into the parts Joseph labeled as revelations that “ought not to be revealed at the present time,” despite modern scholars being fully capable of reading them, and into the Book of Abraham’s heavy dependence on King James Bible wording centuries too late for an ancient Abrahamic record. The hosts discuss Robert Ritner’s rebuttal to the Church’s essay, especially his argument that the surviving papyri, facsimiles, and Joseph’s own Egyptian-language materials point directly to him producing religious text from Egyptian he did not understand. Jeffrey R. Holland’s evasive BBC defense of the translation gets dragged as well: calling something the word of God while admitting you do not understand how it was translated is not an answer so much as a theological shrug in a suit. The episode closes by returning to the season’s central frustration: members were taught the cleanest, most digestible version of Mormon history because the actual version sounds exactly as bizarre as it is. In the name of the sweet artistic mummy and garbage, amen. Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord https://discord.gg/ewzxRmUhK and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode.. If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at greatandspaciouspod@gmail.com. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast! Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/support]

Episode 144 - God is Three Guys in a Trenchcoat

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/fan_mail/new] This week’s cocktail, Two Personages, One Cup, somehow manages to be both doctrinally relevant and spiritually prosecutable. aaaAAAaaa introduces the drink for an episode covering the Book of Mormon translation and First Vision sections of the CES Letter, combining chocolate Crown Royal and blackberry Crown Royal with a symbolic seer stone dropped into the glass, because nothing says “restored gospel” like a liquor cup full of prophetic sediment. The hosts also clarify that Google strongly advised against freezing random rocks and using them as drink-chilling whiskey stones, because apparently even the internet has stronger health-and-safety standards than early Mormon translation procedure. The intro wanders beautifully through root canals, magic bone goop, cruise ship viruses, emergency dental trauma, dishwasher suffering, pioneer ancestor resentment, Met Gala capitalism, Sarah Paulson’s dollar mask, Heidi Klum understanding the assignment, and various pop culture detours including Death by Lightning, The Devil Wears Prada 2, They Will Kill You, and Shrinking. The vibe is deeply “we came here to discuss Joseph Smith, but first let’s litigate whether rocks can leak into your drink.” HISTORY: [00:43:26] Abigail uses the First Vision’s “creeds are an abomination” line as a launchpad into the ancient theological cage match known as Trinitarianism. She breaks down what a creed is, why the Nicene Creed mattered, and how early Christianity had to figure out whether Jesus was fully God, sort of God, God in a human suit, God’s special boy, or just a divine receptionist with excellent sandals. The segment covers Arianism, Arius’s idea that “there was when he was not,” and the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, where bishops tried to settle whether Jesus was made of the same divine God-goo as the Father. The history then moves through the expanded 381 version of the Nicene Creed, the nightmare Greek word homoousios, and the Holy Ghost problem, which Abigail frames as Christianity’s eternal “also there’s a ghost, don’t worry about it” clause. From there, she connects the whole mess back to Mormonism: Joseph Smith’s official First Vision account explicitly rejects Christian creeds, while later LDS theology insists the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are separate beings united in purpose but not substance. The segment ends with the larger point that asking whether Mormons are “Christian” depends entirely on who gets to define Christianity: belief in Jesus, historical continuity, creedal orthodoxy, or just who signed the theological terms and conditions in 381. FHE: [01:37:33] FHE opens with the CES Letter’s section on the Book of Mormon translation, especially the now-infamous rock-in-the-hat method. aaaAAAaaa reads the Richard Bushman quote acknowledging that Church artwork showing Joseph studying gold plates is historically inaccurate, which leads the hosts into the obvious question: if Joseph translated by staring at a stone in a hat, what were the plates even for? The group roasts the narrative whiplash of a religion built around gold plates that allegedly had to be protected, witnessed, hauled through forests, hidden from mobs, and guarded by angels, only for the actual “translation” to happen through a treasure-digging rock in a hat while the plates were covered, nearby, in another room, or functionally irrelevant. The segment also digs into the Church’s later admissions in the Gospel Topics essay and the 2015 Ensign seer stone photo, contrasting that with earlier apologetic material from BYU religion professors who rejected David Whitmer’s rock-in-hat account precisely because it made the plates unnecessary. The hosts point out the absurdity of faithful scholars once arguing “obviously that can’t be how heaven works,” only for the Church to later quietly say, “actually yes, that is how the hat magic worked.” They also discuss the long-standing Church art problem: majestic Joseph lovingly studying gold plates versus the historically messier image of a man burying his face in a hat while Oliver Cowdery takes dictation from the other side of the spiritual cubicle. The second half turns to the First Vision, starting with Gordon B. Hinckley’s claim that the whole Church rests on whether the First Vision happened. The hosts walk through the CES Letter’s summary of the multiple accounts: the 1832 handwritten account, two 1835 accounts, the official 1838 version, and the 1842 account. The 1832 account gets special attention because it contains only “the Lord,” lacks the familiar two-personage setup, says Joseph already believed no true church existed, focuses on forgiveness of sins rather than asking which church to join, and places Joseph in the sixteenth year of his age. From there, the group highlights the contradictions: who appeared, how old Joseph was, why he prayed, whether Satan attacked him, whether a revival actually happened in Palmyra in 1820, and why the First Vision seems to have received little to no public emphasis in the Church’s earliest years. By the end, the hosts frame both sections as examples of the same broader Mormon problem: the Church teaches a polished, coherent version until historical details become impossible to hide, then expects members to pretend the weird version was available and obvious all along. The translation story leaves the plates dangling as a massive plot hole, while the First Vision accounts turn the founding event of the Restoration into a shifting theological rough draft. The episode closes with the hosts encouraging listeners to join the Discord. Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/ewzxRmUhK) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode.. If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at greatandspaciouspod@gmail.com. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast! Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/support]

Episode 143 - Copied And Horse-Pasted

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/fan_mail/new] The crew returns from hiatus for season four with a surprise Moroni appearance, several deeply necessary pizza-related clues, and the announcement that this season will tackle the CES Letter instead of another book of scripture, because frankly, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price have already been dragged around the block wearing tap shoes. This week’s drink is the Anachronagroni, inspired by the Book of Mormon’s greatest hits of temporal nonsense. It’s built like a familiar cocktail from the wrong century: gin, Aperol, mezcal, sweet vermouth, bitters, and a blood orange garnish that initially appears to be a small citrus crime scene. The result is smoky, boozy, weirdly beautiful, and deeply appropriate for an episode about horses, steel, tapirs, and ancient scripture that somehow knows the 1769 King James Bible better than ancient America. History: [00:37:12] Abigail opens the history segment with a season-opener called “The Most Correct Book of 1769,” using the Book of Mormon’s King James Bible problem as the trapdoor into the larger issue: sounding scriptural does not mean sounding ancient. She walks through how the KJV became the default English-language sound of sacred authority, not because God speaks in thee-thou theater kid diction, but because centuries of printing, preaching, memorizing, editing, and standardizing trained English speakers to hear that cadence as “Bible.” The episode lingers especially on the 1769 Oxford edition edited by Benjamin Blayney, whose spelling, punctuation, marginal references, and italicization practices shaped the version of the KJV Joseph Smith likely knew. From there, Abigail turns the Bible into a cursed production history: William Tyndale, Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, the King James Bible, Benjamin Blayney, and finally Joseph Smith’s Bible-flavored religious cosplay. There’s also a glorious detour into the 1631 “Wicked Bible,” whose missing “not” accidentally turned the commandment into “thou shalt commit adultery,” plus a damaged printing that made Deuteronomy describe God showing off his “great ass.” The bigger point, beneath the righteous giggling, is that the Bible itself is a long chain of copying, translation, correction, editorial choice, theology, cultural assumption, and occasional heresy-flavored slap fight. FHE: [01:29:20] The Book Club segment shifts into the first CES Letter section, Book of Mormon, with Abish giving background on Jeremy Runnells, the document’s origin, and why it spread so effectively. The CES Letter began as a collection of sincere questions from a believing Mormon trying to reconcile problems with LDS truth claims, not as a polished anti-Mormon manifesto. After receiving no official church response, it spread through Reddit, Facebook, Mormon forums, blogs, Mormon Stories, MormonThink, and ex-Mormon communities, becoming a portable faith-crisis packet for people who previously had to explain their broken shelves one awkward citation at a time. The group also notes that the Church still has not published a direct official rebuttal, leaving most responses to FAIR, Sarah Allen, Jim Bennett, apologists, podcasters, YouTubers, and other members of the unpaid “please make this make sense” brigade. Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/ewzxRmUhK) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode.. If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at greatandspaciouspod@gmail.com. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast! Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2111609/support]